Colour palette from photos
Young and modern
thats my Al pal!
Everyone by now can recognise the determined individuality of an Al Young painting. Dense visual information. Movement and spontaneity. Improvisation. Jarring colours. Marks so crudely applied as to be of a child’s hand.
— stock
Sure seems secure…
I got a new Toshiba Portege a few weeks ago, the first machine I’ve owned that came with a fingerprint sensor. At first the system seemed to have been designed in a sensible way. The fingerprint template is encrypted and stays local. It is never released or stored in a remote database. I decided to try it out - to experience what it ”felt like”.
A couple of days later, I was at a conference and on stage under pretty bright lights. Glancing down at my shiny new computer, I saw what looked unmistakably like a fingerprint on my laptop’s right mouse button. Then it occurred to me that the fingerprint sensor was only a quarter of an inch from what seemed to be a perfect image of my fingerprint. How secure is that?
Uh, oops?
Overheard
pureCaffeine: People complain about those “disconnected with real life” - 2nd/e-lives etc. Yet nothing of vacant-faced pedestrians off in their own world!
Nokia Music store doesn’t work on Macs, Firefox
Quoth the Nokia Music Store:
Nokia Music does not currently support the Mozilla Firefox (Mac OS X) browser on your operating system
Supported systems are currently Microsoft Windows XP or Vista
Supported browsers on the above systems are currently Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and above
To find out more information on Nokia Music Store and information about accessing the store through your Nokia devices have a look at the Nseries Music pages
What a short-sighted, stupid thing to do.
It’s 2008. If you still think that restricting your online app to one browser on one operating system is a good idea, you deserve to lose a lot of money.
Blast from the past
- Have you got a kitchen drawer full of dull knives that need sharpening?
- Thankyou very much, thankyou very very very much
- CHIPPIES
- SAO brings out the flavour of any food you savour!
- There’s chocolate, strawberry, ripple swirl and bubbleberry too!
- Feel it crumble and melt in your mouth!
- Double double cheese cheese burger burger please!
- Break a finger!
Attn: Mac noobs
How lovely, you have a shiny new Mac and I’m sure you’re finding all kinds of wonderful new surprises and things that don’t work the way you expected. So you shoot your mouth off at work/on a blog/on twitter/something else about how such-and-such is broken or doesn’t work or whatever.
Let me let you in on a little secret here. And I can tell you this from long experience, because I’ve been using Macs now for more than half my life. There are plenty of us Mac folk out there who have been using a Mac for ages. So if one of us offers some help, then we do know what we are talking about and it probably is because you’re doing it wrong.
We are trying to be helpful. Therefore:
- Don’t take it out on people who are trying to be helpful. Yes, it’s frustrating.
- Would it kill you to try something one of us suggests? I don’t care how long you’ve been using Windows/Linux/your Amstrad, you are still a noob, and we are not.
- Say thankyou, lest you be branded as ungrateful little turds unworthy of further help.
Where be the search?
With thanks to stilgherrian for the heads up:
Australia 2020, the meeting of the best and brightests whatever in our great wide brown whatever. It has a big pile of submissions. It has no text search that searches the fucking things. For real. Try out the ’site search’ for the word ‘imperative.’ It appears in at least one submission several times and yet you won’t find it in the search.
Ingenious.
Tacky
Theme park adds up to Disney down under
Some of the world’s biggest and best adventure rides are proposed for the park, to be called African Safari World and set in the grounds of Werribee Open Range Zoo.
Village Roadshow is behind the bid to create Australia’s first safari-themed adventure park, being considered by the Brumby Government.
Roller-coasters and thrilling rides would merge with the existing zoo’s lions, rhinos, giraffes, zebras and other animals in a revamped safari zone if the park is approved.
Sounds… tacky. 
Captioning sucks!
And now, a short message from the Open and Closed Project:
I shall presume it is an April Fool’s Day gag that the homepage I saw on Sunday is set in Comic Sans.*
In a related note, it’s 2008. What is it with all you vlogger types not providing a captioned version? What about you SERIOUS BUSINESS news types and your video reviews of products and such? God. Even a transcript would be better than nothing but you don’t even do that.
- Protip: don’t expose your development environment URL on your ‘prelaunch landing page thingy’ if you don’t want people to see.
From “happy hacking” to “screw you”
From “happy hacking” to “screw you” - the story of Meraki | virishi.net
So… in the course of six months Meraki has gone from “happy hacking - buy our equipment and use it to help poor people access the net” to “pay three times as much for our hardware and we’ll install whatever we want on it, whenever we want, and you can’t look under the hood to see what it’s doing or install your own software on it.”
Thanks Meraki.
This is expecially bad form (and probably illegal) given that their stuff was all orginally developed under an open source licence.
Needless to say I now think Meraki are total scum and they certainly won’t ever, EVER see any of my money again.
Boooooo.
Lamer catblogging
My weekend was much like this too. Happy Easter everyone!
Enhanced episodes - Lostpedia
Beginning with the launch airdate of Season 4 of Lost, ABC has broadcast “enhanced” versions of episodes. These enhanced episodes are not part of ABC Enhanced TV, which provides Internet-interactivity during viewing.
The enhancement features pop-up captions of text, in some cases accompanied by still images of the characters or objects, on the bottom of the screen.
Doesn’t that just take all the fun out of endlessly fapping about it on IRC/with your friends?
Train plan a ‘third world’ joke | Herald Sun
Train plan a ‘third world’ joke | Herald Sun
A CONNEX investigation into ripping out train seats to ease overcrowding has been slammed as a ‘third world’ joke and safety risk.
Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu today branded the idea an insult to passengers suffering overcrowding, cancellations and delays.
The Herald Sun today revealed Connex may remove some seats from the back of carriages to make more standing room for commuters.
Yeah good one, dipshits. This is like the third or fourth time I’ve heard someone suggest this.
Open source sucks… sometimes
Modifying open source software seems like a perfect solution to managers - the solution is almost done, so surely it is just a matter of a few tweaks here and there, a splash of paint and Bob’s you uncle. Yeah - nah.
Yeah, nah indeed. He then goes on to describe a number of issues with getting mod-it-yourself open source projects off the ground, and the amount of aggro and/or cost involved in shoehorning it to fit your needs.
…Open source developers are very narrow minded - their contributions are to suit their specific need, which means every developer will try to include their feature, and unless the leads are ruthless, you end up with a application that has everything that opens and shuts, but that doesn’t really open or shut very well.
Other discussion of this can be seen at the man with no blog’s place.
I’m a big believer in the potential of open source and that’s why I chose to work for a company whose business is open source. And I think that because Squiz’s focus is a combination of both development (the devs, obviously) and implementation (the ’service’ end of the business — ie the ‘ruthless leads’), it’s meant that the development has been driven towards creating a system that addresses broader needs, not two or three unique cases that need to be hacked into submission to address something else.
I think a lot of open source projects (or indeed any project) could stand to follow a similar model of development — developers should be aiming to create things that can be extended to fit more than just a simple, single need. The problem is not with the idea of open source, it’s with narrowly-focused developers and a generic, extensible approach. Shareware and other commercial ventures suffer from the same difficulties.
Haiku Project
Haiku is an open-source operating system currently in development designed from the ground up for desktop computing. Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku aims to provide users of all levels with a personal computing experience that is simple yet powerful, and free of any unnecessary complexities.
Pay more for iPod, get free access to iTunes? - Technology - theage.com.au
Says the Age, and presumably a heap of others.
Apple is talking to music companies about giving customers free access to its entire iTunes music library in exchange for paying a premium for its iPod and iPhone devices, it has been reported.
It’d better be able to burn CDs and all that, the same as another iTMS purchase, or it’ll tank.
